Of all the defenses Mother Nature has provided to the human body, perhaps nothing has been given greater protection than the brain.

Encased entirely in bone, the human brain has shown its appreciation for this extraordinary protection by inventing games that put it in ever-graver danger of serious injury.

But, inveterate tool builders that we are, humans have responded to this threat by inventing ever-more-effective equipment to manage the risk and let the play continue.

One of those tool builders is Robert Vito, CEO of Glen Mills-based Unequal Technologies.

Advertisement

And increasingly, the tools he builds to protect athletes are being used by female athletes.

“Women are very interested in what we’re doing,” he said of his company’s approach to protective headgear.

“There are more concussions in soccer than any other sport, and more and more girls are playing soccer. They don’t have their own channel like the NFL, so no one is really looking at it,” Vito said.

A company founded on the design and production of protective equipment for the military, Unequal Technologies branched out into protective sporting equipment after seeing a 2011 CNN report about a 13-year-old catcher who was killed by a pitch during a Little League game in Arizona.

“If that boy was wearing what we have Michael Vick wearing today, we would have seen him going to his prom instead of the morgue,” said Vito.

Like other technological fields, the field of protective equipment has made advances in recent years. “Think of going from an eight-track tape to an MP4 player,” Vito said.

Unequal Technologies uses military-grade composite constructed and engineered to withstand conditions faced by U.S. Armed Forces and law enforcement in its protective sports equipment.

As a demonstration of the effectiveness, Vito said promotional material will be available soon with a video of “a Louisville slugger being broken over my chest. The video is already shot,” he said Monday, “and I’m still here, thanks to a military-grade, quarter-inch pad.”

“Unequal was born on the battlefield, but is now being forged on the athletic field,” he said. “Our focus is not getting players onto the field, but getting them off the field without major injury.”

And just as there are now female soldiers on the battlefield, there are more and more girls on the sports field.

“I think about these girls who are never going to be professional athletes, but they are out there playing just as hard as if they were,” Vito said.

“I know one girl who missed four months of school because of a concussion,” he said. “That’s something we have to avoid. We want them back in class as soon as possible and we want them doing long-division with their grandkids years from now.”

Protecting the head and brain is most important, Vito said. “Broken ribs will heal. The brain? Well that’s more complicated.”

So is the business of protecting it.

Vito’s company is careful not to claim that its equipment will prevent concussions, mostly because medical opinion on what causes and prevents them is not yet settled.

“When you get two doctors to agree on what causes concussions, be sure to give me a call,” he said.

“The data that has been done independently has shown that head bands/headgear in soccer prevent lacerations and other soft tissue trauma, but they do not do much to protect against concussions,” Franks wrote.

“In fact, more concerning is that some data has shown that use of these devices has actually increased head injuries as it leads to more aggressive play as the athlete feels he or she is more protected due to the use of these devices.”

Vito acknowledges this argument, but disagrees with it.

“To people who say girls will play more aggressively with headgear, I recommend they go out to the field and watch them play,” said Vito. “They are already playing as intensely as the boys.”

As athletic director at The Hill School in Pottstown, Seth Eilberg watches girls sports all the time, and he is still not convinced headgear is necessary.

“I’ve definitely heard other athletic directors say that allowing helmets on say, lacrosse players, would enable more contact and lead to more injuries,” said Eilberg.

Eilberg said girls lacrosse, in which helmets are not worn, “is a very different sport” than boys’ lacrosse. “High checking is not allowed (in girls’ lacrosse) and it’s a much more graceful sport, a much more technical sport. There is a lot more body checking in boys’ lacrosse, and it leads to the potential for more head injuries.”

Which is not to say concussions are not a concern at The Hill.

In fact, in addition to using the same kinds of baseline testing and concussion protocols as public schools, The Hill School is currently testing new sensing equipment inside the school’s football helmets which measures the force of each hit a helmet takes, Eilberg said.

“It’s too small a statistical sample to draw any conclusions yet, but it could lead to us being able to gauge how hard a kid was hit in real time and compare it to their baseline and get a better handle on concussion risk,” Eilberg said.

With the exception of goalies in field hockey and lacrosse, helmets are not required for any girls’ sports in the Pennsylvania Association of Independent Schools whose rules govern the games in which The Hill plays.

“And I have not heard any talk about formally exploring headgear for girls sports” within that league, Eilberg said.

Neither has Lawrence Glanski, athletic director for the Perkiomen Valley School District.

“As far as protective equipment, we do not do anything outside what is required. In soccer, we do not require any headgear, however, we had a few girls wear forms of protective headgear,” Glanski wrote in an e-mail to reply to questions posed by The Mercury.

Nonetheless, “although concussion information and awareness has never been more prevalent than the past two or three years, I personally have not witnessed any increase of players wearing optional, protective headgear,” Glanski wrote.

Parent Tammy Moore thinks it’s a conversation worth having.

Several years ago, her daughter Jamie was practicing with the Pottstown Middle School lacrosse team when a ball hit her daughter’s eye guard, the one piece of protective headgear girls lacrosse players wear.

“The ball hit her face mask and crushed her orbital bone,” Moore said of her daughter’s injury. “The fatty tissue around her eye fell down into her face,” said Moore

It took eight weeks with an eye specialist and, ultimately, surgery, implanting a metal plate where her orbital bone had been, before the worst symptoms stopped for Jamie, now 21 and a student in Montgomery County Community College’s nursing program.

“I suppose it could have been a fluke,” Moore said of her daughter’s injury, but she can’t help believing that “girls should wear helmets.”

Vito believes that wearing some kind of equipment can help. He’s not alone.

“I got a call from the coach of the women’s lacrosse team for Quaker Valley High School, outside of Pittsburgh, and he told me ‘we have to do something about all these concussions. The players are getting hit by balls, sticks’,” Vito said.

He provided the school with protective head bands and soft-padded headgear — called “the band” and “the dome,” respectively — “and the head injuries dropped.”

Tests on Unequal’s equipment have shown they reduce impacts by more than half on the organization’s “severity index,” the standard by which athletic equipment is measured by the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment.

However no NOCSAE standards exists for the “band” or “dome” headgear now being marketed by Unequal, according to spokesman Adam Montgomery.

And again, Vito is careful not to claim the equipment prevents concussions.

In fact, it is impossible to log onto the “headgear” section of his company’s web site without acknowledging having read a pop-up warning which reads: “No helmet pad can prevent or eliminate the risk of concussions or other serious head injuries while playing sports. Scientists have also not reached agreement on how the results of impact absorption tests relate to concussions. No conclusions about a reduction of risk or severity of concussive injury should be drawn from impact absorption tests.”

“We try to manage expectations. Some players are more susceptible to concussions than others,” he said. “We’re very conservative with our claims.”

But it’s important to remember, Vito noted, that brain injury is not always the result of a single impact.

“Consider what happens with what we call ‘sub-concussive hits;’ they’re not enough to ring your bell, but there can be damage done and it can add up,” Vito said.

“Think of hitting your marble counter-top over and over with a hammer. You probably won’t see anything the first time, but if you keep doing it, how many hits do you think it takes until you see the crack?” Vito asked. “It’s not the first one that knocks you out, but it may be the third or the fourth one that does it.”

“Think about it,” said Vito. “A soccer ball comes at your head at 60 to 80 miles per hour. How many times can you hit it with your head before you start taking damage?”

But its not just soccer balls that pose risk for head injury.

In fact, while ASTM International, formerly known as the American Society for Testing and Materials, does provide rankings for soccer head protection, “ASTM standard does not address head to ball impacts, rather head to hard surface impacts such as head to head, head to ground and head to post, which are believed to be the primary mechanism in most soccer concussions.”

Unequal’s equipment, which includes supplemental padding inside helmets, is used on the professional sports field as well and Vito has no shortage of names to drop when mentioning this.

In addition to having two-time NFL MVP and Super Bowl MVP Kurt Warner serving as the company’s spokesperson, Vito notes that former Pittsburgh Steeler linebacker James Harrison has written to say that for the first time in a game in which he sacked the quarterback three times, “he had no shooting pains in his head, no ringing in his ears and he was not seeing stars” after using Unequal’s equipment.

In addition to its own equipment, the company also endorses the benefits of a holistic approach to athletics which Vito calls “the three Ts — training, technique and technology.”

His company calls it “Play it Safe PA” and, in partnership with Schuylkill Valley Sports, aims to help young players avoid injury through effective conditioning, safer procedures and protective gear.

Ultimately, addressing sports concussions is about more than any single thing, says Vito.

It’s not just training, or just equipment, or just medical science.

And, not surprisingly, Vito thinks headgear is an important component.

“We’ve got to get past this idea that the ‘gladiator’ on the field doesn’t wear head protection,” he said. “She does, and she should.”

About the Author

Evan Brandt has worked for The Mercury since November 1997. His beat includes Pottstown, the surrounding townships and the Pottstown and Pottsgrove school districts, as well as other varied general topics like politics, the environment and education. Reach the author at ebrandt@pottsmerc.com
or follow Evan on Twitter: @PottstownNews.